Poet * Writer * Editor

Still Shaking

Tea and coffee and honey and knives and cookies and Geico and more tea. That’s what you find at the Coffee & Tea Festival. First stop, Queens to pick up B. Fun Fact: Queens a week after a snow storm looks like Queens the day after a snow storm. Narrow roads, no parking, me and my nonsense of direction even with a GPS all made for an interesting venture. Fun Fact: Siri wanted me to go the wrong way down a One Way and then wanted me to make a U-Turn by going on a highway. I did neither and still found B

Second stop, Brooklyn to meet SD and have tea and coffee. Fun Fact: Brooklyn a week after a snow storm looks like Brooklyn the day after a snow storm. After making wider and wider circles around blocks, we found a parking space in which I wedged my car and asked B to climb over the driver side to get out.

We’d made it to the mecca of free samples concerning hot beverages. The first thing we grabbed: free water enhanced with electrolytes. The second thing we grabbed: chicken with a spicy rub. Neither of these had anything to do with coffee or tea, but what a way to start!

Then came Kombucha and some tea and some coffee. Then came the lemonade coffee drink thing that sounds incredibly scary and tastes fantastically refreshing. Yes, these are the risks you take when you have free samples staring you in the face.

I talked to pretty much every table, tasting anything that they offered. At one point, I had a small plastic cup of flavored sugar granules in my hand. That’s when I thought, Hey, maybe it’s better to think before snacking. I mean, in what world does one carry around a cup of sugar and eat it? I suppose in the world of free samples for all.

Whenever I caught sight of SD, she’d found a new snack. Once I also saw her talking to a man wielding a knife, and he let her demonstrate her new knowledge of how to use said knife to me.

Every time I saw some coffee, I called over B, which once ended with her having a tiny very strong espresso. I didn’t have any espresso, but I did have maybe every other kind of coffee you could have.

I also tasted almost every tea available. Then I tasted some kind of pumpkin seed milk. That’s probably where one should draw the line. I did not. I had more things, signed up for things, tasted some sort of hot sauce that clearly had no place being at festival for coffee and tea, and then I bought some very cute tea from a company called Oh You TEAse because their table was like being at a tea party. Oh, and the tea is yummy.

We called it a day after we’d exhausted every turn and aisle including navigating around the Geico table that was giving away gekkos and sunglasses. Again, why were they there?

So, like, I drink green tea every day. I don’t drink coffee often, nor do I indulge in caffeine much. That means, by the time I got to the car, I was wondering if I could find a coffee shop for a bathroom break because I was not walking back seven blocks to go. Eh, no biggie, it could wait.

Except that it couldn’t and I was like, B, I usually don’t do things like this, but I’ve gotta make a pit stop. And so I found a gas station that had a bathroom “outside around to the left.” It was a perfectly acceptable alternative to going in my pants.

When I got home, I was all shaky and hyped up on sugar and caffeine. I looked up how to counterbalance caffeine. Vitamin C and water. So I had some clementines and drank maybe a gallon of water. By that night, I was almost back to baseline.

Since then, I’ve been having my green tea in the morning and then trying a sample tea in the afternoon, and I’ll keep doing that until all the teas are gone. Which means I’ll have to go back for more when the festival returns. Or I could just find and buy it, but what fun is that?